tag > Health
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The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health emergency that requires a coordinated and large-scale response by governments worldwide. However, States’ efforts to contain the virus must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance. We, the undersigned organizations, urge governments to show leadership in tackling the pandemic in a way that ensures that the use of digital technologies to track and monitor individuals and populations is carried out strictly in line with human rights.
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UK government using confidential patient data in coronavirus response (Guardian)
"Technology firms are processing large volumes of confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation as part of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak"
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In summary: Bill Gates talks about creating a vaccine with low side effects so it can be given to 7 billion people. He says he wants to use his vaccine to vaccinate the entire population. He also says he’ll need indemnification to be protected from all lawsuits.
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Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology (Google)
Across the world, governments and health authorities are working together to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, to protect people and get society back up and running. Software developers are contributing by crafting technical tools to help combat the virus and save lives. In this spirit of collaboration, Google and Apple are announcing a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design.
[...] Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.
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Brussels Becomes First Major City to Halt 5G Due to Health Effects (brusselstimes)
Plans for a pilot project to provide high-speed 5G wireless internet in Brussels have been halted due to fears for the health of citizens, according to reports. “I cannot welcome such technology if the radiation standards, which must protect the citizen, are not respected, 5G or not,” Environment minister Céline Fremault told Bruzz.
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Microsoft exec says coronavirus could spark big shift for AI in health care (techexplorer)
Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott grew up fascinated by the 1960s Apollo space program and then-President John F. Kennedy's vision of a moon shot. Now, he envisions just as ambitious a project taking shape as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic. Just as the U.S. government significantly invested to put Neil Armstrong and others on the moon by 1969—$200 billion in today's dollars by his estimate—Scott said similar funding in artificial intelligence technology could be a difference-maker for our nation's battered health care system.
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Microsoft Patents New Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data
Microsoft has patented a cryptocurrency mining system that leverages human activities, including brain waves and body heat, when performing online tasks such as using search engines, chatbots, and reading ads. “A user can solve the computationally difficult problem unconsciously,” the patent reads.
#Technology #Health #Biology #Military #Crypto #Economics #Cryptocracy
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Look Who's Coming to the Rescue! - Documentary by Truthstream Media on Bill Gates
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Stanford researchers propose AI in-home system that can monitor for coronavirus symptoms
During the “COVID-19 and AI” livestream event run by the Stanford Institute of Human-Centered AI (HAI), Stanford professor and HAI codirector Dr. Fei-Fei Li presented a concept for an AI-powered in-home system that could track a resident’s health, including for signs of COVID-19, while ensuring privacy.
#Comment: A highly intrusive "AI" in your living room, constantly analysing your bio-signals and sending it to its shadowy corporate owners. What could possibility go wrong? But don't worry and smile - cause comments like this will soon be banned by A.I, so we can feel better:
Microsoft claims its AI framework spots fake news better than state-of-the-art baselines
In a study Microsoft propose an AI framework — Multiple sources of Weak Social Supervision (MWSS) — that leverages engagement and social media signals to detect fake news. They say that after training and testing the model on a real-world data set, it outperforms a number of state-of-the-art baselines for early fake news detection.
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In this article, I will elucidate the Indian government’s two primary discourses concerning yoga since 2014 as right-wing Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have interacted with both international and domestic audiences. These discourses can be broadly grouped into two categories, or what I refer to as Modi and the BJP’s “double discourse”: (1) Yoga as a global soft power solution to counter the Global North’s climate change privilege on the international stage and (2) Yoga as biopower for the advancement of India’s depressed economy on the domestic front. Relying on yoga’s polyvalent character, Modi and the BJP are able to frame yoga in these two particular ways—which together signal their commitment to neoliberal economic ideology—by drawing from historical and contemporaneous precedents which I also outline in the article. I conclude with a brief visit to the preparations for the BJP’s 2019 International Day of Yoga, where this double discourse becomes most evident in the two divergent themes announced for the event.
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Tuberculosis (WHO)
Tuberculosis (TB) is a global disease, found in every country in the world. It is the LEADING infectious cause of death worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.8 billion people—close to one quarter of the world's population—are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), the bacteria that causes TB. Last year, 10 million fell ill from TB and 1.5 million died. Tuberculosis kills five thousand people every day. TB is an airborne disease that can be spread by coughing or sneezing and is the leading cause of infectious disease worldwide.
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This window of opportunism (about intel)
The Chinese Communist Party is using the current crisis to showcase its most dystopian iteration of total surveillance yet. As Europe anxiously looks to Beijing for technological solutions to Covid-19, the window of what we perceive to be acceptable surveillance practice may shift accordingly. It is therefore essential that we stick to the principles of proportionality and necessity. They force us to spell out the aim of surveillance and tell us where to search for inspiration instead.
This is likely to have significant implications for surveillance policy in other parts of the world. For one because the CCP has a strong political and economic interest in convincing other countries that its model of governance is viable. Covid-19 has only given wings to its attempt to broadly export authoritarianism. For another, because the attention citizens and politicians in Europe pay to the Chinese example in the pandemic is likely to shift what they will consider reasonable surveillance practice.
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In Italy, Going Back to Work May Depend on Having the Right Antibodies (NYTimes)
Photo: Identification of inmates in German concentration camps - The Fascists had many "special licences" The conservative president of the northeastern Veneto region has proposed a special “license” for Italians who possess antibodies that show they have had, and beaten, the virus. The former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, a liberal, has spoken about a “Covid Pass” for the uninfected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that while the lockdown remained in place, the government had begun working with scientists to determine how to send people who have recuperated back to work. With its echoes of a “Brave New World,” the debate about how to reopen arrived in earnest this week in Italy.
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New episode from the popular series "Oligarchic psychopaths driving the agenda"
Bill Gates - the second richest oligarch on earth - is "looking at getting vaccines to everyone in the world" (quote from the video), after last week predicting that "Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it." Good times.
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Google Is Publishing Location Data From 131 Countries To Show How Coronavirus Lockdowns Are Working (Buzzfeed) - COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (Google)
These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential. The Reports were developed to be helpful while adhering to our stringent privacy protocols and protecting people’s privacy.
Related: Moscow To Launch Mandatory Surveillance App To Track Residents In Corona Lockdown
Related: S Korea unleashes all-out policy assault on virus - ‘Big Brother’ on steroids.#Health #Technology #InfoSec #SE #Augmentation #ML #Cryptocracy
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Reiki Can’t Possibly Work. So Why Does It? (The Atlantic)
The energy therapy is now available in many hospitals. What its ascendance says about shifts in how American patients and doctors think about health care.
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Global Narrative Breakdown
As the
corona virus crisis unfolds, an army of conspiracy theorists has emerged, producing a dizzying amount of colourful viral narratives. The mainstream media is responding aggressively, with an onslaught of critical coverage about how "the alternative media and crazy conspiracy theorists are putting all our health in danger". Yet on closer examination, the mainstream's responds is as primitive and manipulative as the narratives of conspiracy theorist they critique.
While they might appear like enemies engaged in a war over the sovereignty of interpretation of reality, in actuality the mainstream media and conspiracy theorists have a complex, interdependent relationship. Regardless of who's "truth" is "righter", both are in effect collaboratively poisoning an already highly in-transparent media and communications environment, contributing to a global narrative breakdown.
Currently billions of peoples are assaulted with overwhelming amounts of "information", "truths" and "opinions", presented by experts, politicians, oligarchs and conspiracy theorists. In such an environment, where all signals are lost in an ocean of noise, shared narratives (right/wrong, etc.) quickly collapse and large-scale developments can happen silently, unnoticed by most.
A global narrative collapse is especially dangerous in a time where there is no shortage of actual"conspiracy facts", mostly ignored in the public discourse. For examples: How the USA and EU are pumping uncounted trillions into the world economy (mostly reaching super elites, cementing totalitarian control structures) - or the accelerating global oil crash (oil is in 85% of stuff we consume) - or the bifurcation of global infrastructure (china/russia are launching their own internet and digital currencies) - or the ongoing collapse of capitalism and rebirth as the "fourth industrial rei...volution" - or the radical expansion of computational surveillance and policing (Dictators with A.I's don't care if you "have nothing to hide", they care about power) and the creation of global DNA databases.
In the shadow of the the corona virus dominating the global media cycle for month, such projects ("conspiracy facts") are accelerating and reaching maturity. Its effect will be felt for decades to come (unlike this virus). Yet instead of informing the public about such urgent matters, who does the global mainstream media choose to constantly ridicule and critique? A wide range of incoherent conspiracy theorists - mixing up everything from biowarfare, killer beams, space aliens and Jesus Christ into one crazy story.
What is at play here are political attack tactics, known at least since Machiavelli: "Gaslighting", "Fog of war" and "Flooding the zone": Providing experts, idiots, crazies and disinfo agents a megaphone, so they can pump out wast amounts of confusing and contradictory information, frequently attacking the integrity of those making counter-claims, and occasionally injecting conspiracy theories. Within such a media environment, all serious discussion about "conspiracy facts" will be inevitably confused with far-out garbage - to be disagreed by any half way thinking person. We now have a global media environment in which very large-scale developments ("conspiracy facts") can happen silently, unnoticed by most.
But hey, back to the program: Switch off your brain immediately and just PANIC! So that nobody dears to even ask critical question when conspiratorial scenarios like the post-democratic police state emerges in full force. Now smile, go wash your hands and enjoy the breakdown of the global narrative and rise of the global grid.
#Media #Narrative #InfoSec #Health #Cryptocracy #Ideas #fnord #Comment
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Testing for dna…er… I mean, corona virus - by gizadeathstar
"However, that raises another less-obvious but still-implied question, and hence our high octane speculation of the day. The coupling of testing with sequencing companies suggests the possibility that the tests could include a covert DNA sampling itself, building up a large database. Indeed, perhaps the sequencing expertise was needed in a certain way, for if one suspected biowarfare were being carried out, one would want sample of patients' DNA to see what, if any, might be genetic markers for people taken ill with the virus. And that possibility suggests in turn yet another possibility. Perhaps, just perhaps, one of the objectives of the whole plandemic is to create a climate of opinion for massive testing (voluntary or otherwise), because the designers of the operation are looking for some particular "group" of "someones" not otherwise visible to the naked eye, but only detectable through genetic sequencing."
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Moscow To Launch Mandatory Surveillance App To Track Residents In Coronavirus Lockdown (npr.org)
City authorities in Moscow are rolling out new digital "social monitoring" tools targeting the public, after what officials say were constant violations of the city's quarantine imposed this week to fight the spread of the new coronavirus. Under restrictions in place since Monday, most of the city's 12 million residents must remain indoors, barring a few exceptions. But starting Thursday, Muscovites will have their movements tracked through a mandatory app required on their smartphones. Don't have one? The city says it will lend out devices.
"One thing is clear," wrote Leonid Volkov, a chief strategist of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, on his Telegram channel. "The coronavirus will eventually leave but this digital concentration camp will remain."
